Karl Barth's ecclesiology reconsidered

Scottish Journal of Theology

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 287-299

  Healy, Nicholas M ^a  

^a ST JOHN'S UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62949142436     PISSN: 00369306     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0036930604000225     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology, Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 2001 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001). Cited henceforth in parentheses in the text as WGU.
2. Mangina's phrase is from his 'Bearing the Marks of Jesus: The Church in the Economy of Salvation in Barth and Hauerwas', Scottish Journal of Theology 52/3 (1999), pp. 294-5.
3. See Hauerwas's 'Hooks: Random Thoughts by Way of a Response to Griffiths and Ochs', a reply to a review of the lectures by Paul Griffiths entitled 'Witness and Conviction in With the Grain of the Universe', both in Modern Theology 19/1 (Jan. 2003), pp. 89-101, 67-75 respectively. The clarification is made on pp. 91f.
4. Besides Mangina, perhaps the most influential recent challenge comes from Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000).
5. I refer, of course, to the often appropriated formula of the title of MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1988).
6. References in parentheses are to the Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936-77)
7. as CD and to The Christian Life. Church Dogmatics IV.4: Lecture Fragments (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981) as ChrL.
8. David Demson, Hans Frei and Karl Barth: Different Ways of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), p. ix.
9. See CD 4/2, pp. 131-54
10. Gene Rogers draws upon Florensky and others to suggest that criticisms of Barth for not sufficiently developing his doctrine of the Holy Spirit may ride on a (mistaken) desire to know too much about the Spirit. See Eugene F. Rogers, Jr, 'The Mystery of the Spirit. Three Traditions: Calvin, Rahner, Florensky, or, You Keep Wondering Where the Spirit Went', Modern Theology 19/2 (2003), pp. 243-60.
11. See, e.g., CD 3/4, pp. 3-32.
12. I made similar criticisms myself in my 'The Logic of Karl Barth's Ecclesiology', Modern Theology 10/1 (1994), pp. 253-70. I am less sure now, and understand more clearly Barth's ecclesiological strengths; hence the 'reconsidered' in the title of the present article.
13. One of the best ways to get a sense of Hauerwas's work as a whole is through The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
14. In an essay in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1998), under the subheading 'The Difference that God Makes' (pp. 214-17), Hauerwas writes of the 'conceptual resources' that differentiate Christianity from the modern university. Nothing is said there of divine action.
15. See, e.g., the otherwise exemplary discussions of human action by Charles R. Pinches, Theology and Action: After Theory in Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002),
16. and John Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
17. or L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995),
18. and the various collections of essays on practices, most evidently The Church as Counterculture, ed. Michael L. Budde and Robert W. Brimlow (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).
19. See Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989), pp. 49-53.
20. Rowan Williams, review of Eugene F. Rogers's Sexuality and the Christian Body, Scottish Journal of Theology 56/1 (2003), pp. 82-8.